What were the Saints thinking?

The final play of New Orleans’ loss to Seattle was bizarre, and appeared to be a mental gaffe by Saints’ receiver Marques Colston. Instead of stepping out of bounds and stopping the clock to give the Saints a chance to get off one more play, Colston threw the ball to try to keep the play alive. See the play here.

Of course, it didn’t work. The Saints were penalized, the game was over, and Colston was added to the Chris Webber Hall of Fame for Playoff Mistakes.

“We’re probably maybe a play early from [needing to call] it, but with no timeouts … ” Payton said. “We’d kind of seen something on tape, Marques has got a pretty good arm. You know, hindsight, [it was] a play where he could have caught it, stepped out and then maybe [we throw] a Hail Mary to the end zone. But it was a play we had put in a week and a half ago, prior to this game, which was a deep throw to Marques and then across the field to Cadet. So, yeah, he wasn’t freelancing.”

Payton is one of the league’s best coaches. In seven seasons coaching the Saints — not counting the year he sat out because of the bounty suspension — he has been to the playoffs in five. He won a Super Bowl.

His credentials are exactly why this error was so shocking. With 11 seconds left, the Saints easily could have gotten off two plays. Colston got the first down and was just a foot or two from the sideline. Even without timeouts, a step out of bounds would have stopped the clock and given the Saints the ball at the Seahawks’ 38-yard line.

Instead, Payton called a trick play when the expected play would have gotten the job done. Payton now has plenty of time to think about what went wrong in the final seconds of the game.